The call gathers its participants from Chicago, Boston, Silicon Valley, and New York. On the one side are the newspeople—including, along with me, former New York–magazine editor Caroline Miller, former managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press Ken Doctor, and various writers and reporters I've dragooned—and on the other side, the software engineers and their marketing counterparts from a technology company called Highbeam Research, which owns one of the largest news databases in the world (50 million articles). Highbeam has kindly agreed to put up the seed money to let us start our news … what? Not paper, not show, not screen, not portal (nobody says that anymore)—a news something in digital form.

The job of the newspeople is to explain what makes news news—what makes news jump off the page or the screen, why it is not just merely data. That news is, for better or worse, a card trick. Holding people's attention is the trick. Impassive response: the unstated point of the tech people seems to be that their job is strictly procedural, granular (pride in the trees rather than the forest), and, they imply, honest (as opposed to the flimflam of media), and, too, that this is why young people are off news, because they see that it's just a stupid card trick (poor Katie Couric could be defined as a stupid card trick). The techies go back to talking about data hierarchies while I despair and press the mute button and turn the water on my head.